The nature and nurture of heritage language acquisition

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ScienceDirect Lingua 164 (2015) 239--250 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua

Editorial

The nature and nurture of heritage language acquisition

1. General introduction The present Special Issue presents a selection of papers resulting from the workshop ‘‘Heritage languages: language contact-change-maintenance and loss in the wave of new migration landscapes’’ which was held at the University of Wuppertal, Germany, in October 2012.1 Combining empirical research and theoretical discussion, the papers significantly contribute to the ongoing debate and process of theorizing in heritage language (HL) acquisition of the last decade, since they offer further possibilities to narrow down constellations and types of phenomena where the hotly debated issue of incomplete acquisition, i.e., the idea of a language acquisition process in childhood which, most likely due to insufficient input, does not lead to a fully developed system of the L1, may indeed occur. By studying a variety of language combinations, most of which have thus far been the subject of relatively little research, namely Portuguese/ German, Spanish/German, Italian/German, French/German, French/Italian, French/Spanish, Italian/English, Cantonese/English, Russian/English and Greek/Swedish, it becomes possible to achieve a better basis in order to study some of the issues identified by Benmamoun et al. (2013b). Amongst others, the following important research questions are still pending: (1) to identify what the notions of ‘‘heritage speaker’’ and ‘‘incomplete acquisition’’ really mean and how we want to define them; (2) the role of the input: the quality and quantity of input matters, and therefore a heritage speaker’s (HS) bilingual exposure to input can differ from a monolingual’s, and from another bilingual’s, in crucial ways, including age of first exposure (early vs. late in life), setting (naturalistic vs. instructed); mode (oral vs written), quantity (abundant and frequent or not) and quality (linguistically varied and contextually appropriate or not); (3) the involved linguistic features: explore interpretable features/micro-parameters (i.e., at the syntax-semantics interface) and non-interpretable features/macro-parameters (i.e., syntactic features). Further relevant issues concern: (4) the role of language-external factors, e.g., diverse acquisition patterns including the literacy skills/metalinguistic awareness which may be crucial to stabilize language knowledge, years of immigration; (5) methodological issues: It is necessary to include not only group results, but also individual performances, as the results/ findings reported in most studies are often very opaque which ultimately would allow us to disentangle and evaluate tendencies vs. target behaviors. In some studies one finds a high amount of intergroup variation. Differences at the linguistic system level vs. the individual speaker knowledge/competence need to be identified and accounted for. This introduction is organized as follows: section 2 presents the state of the art of research regarding the pending issues of HL acquisition presented above and integrates the presentation of the papers in this issue related to the points (1)--(5) mentioned above. Section 3 illustrates the needs for future research identified in the previous section with an example of an under-studied phenomenon, namely Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Heritage Spanish which adds a further

1 We thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German National Research Funding Association) and the Rectorate of the University of Wuppertal for the financial support which made this international workshop possible. The workshop was organized by the two guest-editors and Prof. Dr. Natascha Müller (University of Wuppertal).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.05.008 0024-3841/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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aspect to those treated in the papers of the volume, namely the occurrence of ongoing linguistic change which is illustrated in Spanish HS. Section 4 concludes the introduction and follows our acknowledgments. 2. State of research and contributions in this volume 2.1. The concept of the terms ‘‘heritage speaker’’ and ‘‘(incomplete) heritage language acquisition’’ This subsection starts with a survey of current definitions and interpretations of the term heritage speakers, since it appears that we get different findings depending on the definition used as we will show and discuss in the following. An often used definition is the one developed by Valdés (2000) as cited, for example, by Montrul (2004:125): ‘‘The term heritage speaker as used in the United States refers to a bilingual ‘raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken, who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language’ (Valdés, 2000, p. 1).’’ In a more recent version of her definition, Valdés (2005) highlights the conception of emerging contact varieties for heritage languages which led her to a reconceptualization of her former definition. Acknowledging the fact that ‘‘many bilingual students are (re)learning their heritage language in the United States, being thus heritage students’’ on the one hand, and the differences between these students and second language learners on the other, Valdés (2005:413) uses the term ‘‘L1/L2 user’’. She further proposes an L1/L2 user continuum where L1/L2 users appear as speakers of contact varieties of language which may change over time: ‘‘L1/L2 users are speakers of what is known in the field of bilingualism and sociolinguistics as contact varieties of language [. . .] Contact varieties of language have developed in very different types of settings all over the world, most frequently as a result of a sociohistorical background involving nation-building, conquest, colonization, and immigration’’ (Valdés, 2005:415). With respect to the observed high variation among heritage speakers, Valdés (2005:416 et sqq.) hypothesizes that there are important differences in the implicit linguistic knowledge systems of various types of L1/L2 users. In order to understand these systems, Valdés (2005:416 et sqq.) requires not only to trace changes in L1 competence over time, but also to provide information about the communal language, defined as ‘‘a result in immigrant communities where the various incoming varieties of the heritage language may have converged to produce a new dialect through processes involving accommodation, the development of interdialectisms, leveling and simplification’’ (Valdés, 2005:416, citing Penny, 2000), i.e., the stronger integration of sociolinguistic factors in the investigation of competence systems (see section 2.3 for details on heritage acquisition research from this perspective). Finally, Valdés (2000:416 et sqq.) notes various possible changes in the resulting communal language: It may itself undergo contact-induced change through its contact with the dominant language due to lexical and structural borrowing and changes may also take place in the communal language, which, though originating in the monolingual environment, may have been accelerated because of contact with the dominant language. While we mostly understand the communal language to be the dominant one, Meisel (2011) refers to the dominance of one language in the bilingual individual. Having a weaker language alone, however, does not suffice to provoke language change: according to Meisel, rather input from L2 learners or a delayed acquisition onset, combined with grammar-internal and language-external factors, need to concur. Although many researchers base their work on the fundamental definition of heritage speakers by Valdés (2000, 2005), different aspects of it have been highlighted which led to the development of two major positions regarding the interpretation of differential language use and knowledge by HS observed so far: a position incorporating the incomplete acquisition hypothesis and another formulating conceptual and methodological arguments against it and in favor of processes of linguistic change. Before turning to a more detailed description of the two positions, two initial remarks are in order. Firstly, the definitions used suggest that there has emerged, quite suddenly, a new kind of speaker. It should be emphasized that HS are merely bilinguals with a specific acquisition setting, characterized by particular input conditions and particular sociolinguistic factors, to which the scientific research experience in bilingualism should and can be applied (see also Meisel, 2013; Kupisch, 2013; Flores, in this issue). Secondly, the described divide between the positions is strongly related to the results yielded in the USA and Canada on the one hand and European countries on the other: While there is a high degree of variability in the observed HS competences in the USA and Canada, the studies of HS in European countries show more homogeneity in the HS due to a stronger cultural closeness (see Flores, in this issue, for a more detailed discussion) and argue more often against incomplete acquisition. Another reason might lie in different language policies in the countries mentioned which might favor a tendency to indeed produce different types of heritage speakers, namely (fully) proficient HL1 speakers and functional HL1 speakers/HL1 overhearers, i.e., HL speakers who exhibit only a reduced competence of speaking their HL or even only understand but do not speak it, as proposed by Pires (2011:129). The present volume contains studies of heritage speakers in Canada as well as in different European countries, thus allowing a re-evaluation of this argument. The incomplete acquisition approach emphasizes the variability of HL competence alluded to by Valdés (2000, 2005) and defines different types of HS on a continuum of competence (see in particular Polinsky and Kagan, 2007; Benmamoun et al., 2013a,b). A crucial assumption is that the HL, the first language, is not completely acquired due to the

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individual’s early switch to the dominant language (Polinsky and Kagan, 2007:369 et sqq.). An important concept of this approach is the baseline language, a concept drawn originally from Creole languages where the baseline language is that of the lexifier language. Polinsky and Kagan (2007:370 et sqq.) argue that the baseline language for HS is the language that the learner was exposed to as a child, i.e., the language of the parents (first generation immigrants), not the norm or standard language available to fully competent speakers. Crucially, in their comparisons, these authors explicitly exclude the possibility of reaching the community language/baseline or native competence for heritage speakers. They obviously do not share the current definition of Creole languages, namely contact varieties of language, thus languages in their own right and not just reduced or non-standard versions of the superstrate languages (see e.g., Holm’s 2001 survey of Creole studies). As a consequence, the proficiency of HS (who thus far are mainly investigated at an adult age) is classified according to the distance from the baseline and explained as a result of language attrition/loss in first generation migrants and incomplete acquisition in the subsequent generations (cf. Anstatt, 2011; Montrul, 2004, 2008, 2010; Montrul and Bowles, 2009; Polinsky, 1997, 2006; Silva-Corvalán, 1994; Tsimpli et al., 2003, among others). While language loss/ attrition refers to a process of erosion of features of the L1 after its complete acquisition and a phase of stability (see e.g., Sorace, 2000; Tsimpli et al., 2004), incomplete acquisition describes a process in childhood most likely due to insufficient input to maintain or develop the full system of the L1 (see e.g., Montrul, 2004, 2010; Domínguez, 2009). Very recently, Benmamoun et al. (2013b) discussed this approach based on criticism received for their position paper (Benmamoun et al., 2013a) and admitted that ultimate attainment should not define HL speakers. They further clarified that ‘‘incomplete acquisition’’ should describe the process, but not the result of an incomplete grammar. A related position is proposed by Kaltsa et al. (in this issue), who define L1 attrition as an abstract process and explain the observed divergence among HS as an outcome of a byproduct of bilingualism. The result reading, however, is the most frequent one, which has led to criticism in recent empirical studies accounting for complete acquisition in various domains and language combinations (see e.g., Alarco´n, 2011 for gender acquisition in Spanish HS in the US; Flores, 2012 for Portuguese HS, Di Venanzio et al., 2012 for the object domain in Spanish HS and Di Venanzio et al., accepted for publication, for the same domain in Italian HS). The different results cited above and the particular characteristics of HL acquisition in terms of the quantity and quality of the input (see section 2.2 for further discussion of this issue) led some researchers to assume the possibility of complete acquisition of a contact variety which differs from the monolingual variety of origin due to language change (see e.g., Cazzoli-Goeta et al., 2008; Rothman, 2009; Pires and Rothman, 2009; Pires, 2011). Most contributions in the present volume do not find evidence for incomplete acquisition and interpret the observed differences between the investigated HS and monolingual control groups as ‘‘different but not incomplete grammar’’ which may also be formulated as language change (see also section 3 for a more explicit statement on language change in progress). For instance, Hager and Müller (in this issue) argue that both monolingual and heritage (adult) speakers change the language in the periphery and that the term ‘‘incomplete acquisition’’ should be used carefully and not be transported in an unreflected manner to non-linguists in a way to avoid prejudices. Further criticism and theoretical reflection concerns the native nature of HL, and the practice of comparing with monolingual varieties of the HL (see also Valdés, 2005; Pires, 2011). The native nature of HL acquisition has been discussed in particular by Pascual y Cabo and Rothman (2012) from a conceptual viewpoint: Since the acquisition of the HL, like monolingual acquisition, happens naturally in early childhood, the question of how and why HS’ grammatical competence is selectively distinct from a native grammar constitutes a logical problem (see Pascual y Cabo and Rothman, 2012:451). This question is linked to a further, fundamentally methodological issue, namely the comparison with monolinguals: the term incomplete acquisition is only appropriate under the assumption that comparing HS competence to monolinguals is inherently justifiable. The authors conclude that it is not fair to call those differences in grammatical domains incomplete acquisition where the input is not qualitatively different (Pascual y Cabo and Rothman, 2012:452 et sqq.). The underlying equation of native competence with monolingual competence has also been criticized very recently by Rothman and Treffers-Daller (2014). The authors emphasize the fact that ‘‘native’’ can and should describe states of linguistic knowledge which vary, even significantly, from monolingual baselines (Rothman and Treffers-Daller, 2014:97). The above sketch of the conceptual and empirical treatment of the nature of HL acquisition and the terms ‘‘heritage speaker’’ and ‘‘incomplete acquisition’’ illustrates the need to overcome the described divide of positions and to reach a better understanding of incomplete acquisition. One important issue is the stronger integration of various groups of bilingual individuals, in particular the comparison with the findings of 2L1 acquisition where the question of the input in the two languages being acquired by the investigated children is also treated (see for example Hager and Mueller, in this issue; Meisel, 2013). Another important comparison in this context is the one between heritage speakers and L2 learners of the relevant languages (see Kaltsa et al., in this issue, comparing Greek HS and Greek L2 learners in Sweden). The differences between heritage speakers and early/late bilingualism need to be explored in order to be able to grasp the consequences for language acquisition theory. Furthermore, we need better predictions regarding the rhythm or time of acquisition. It is important to stress that we are not claiming that heritage speakers’ competences are not different from the language of the heritage parents’ competence, and/or from the ‘‘homeland’’ variety across the board. Based on the results

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from HS research advocating incomplete acquisition, we know that there is some kind of incomplete acquisition/learning. There is evidence that heritage speakers do not learn/acquire the homeland language at all, for numerous reasons, or only acquire rudimentary aspects of it, or never acquire the complexities of uninterpretable features such as gender or case marking or the subjunctive for instance. However, by the same token, there is strong evidence that there are heritage speakers who have acquired the homeland language fully, or aspects of it (mainly at the phonological level), just as some late second language learners acquire the second language fully. In sum, it is not clear why HS speakers’ acquisition is slower if UG has a role to play. Various factors, in particular input quantity and quality, intra-linguistic (grammatical domain and the involved features) and extra-linguistic conditions, but also methodological issues in data collection, may explain (some of) the observed delays and are treated in turn in the following subsections. 2.2. The role of the input Starting with the discussion of the input in HL acquisition, Pires and Rothman (2009) made an empirically and theoretically important contribution to the input question. They compared the acquisition of inflected infinitives in children living in the US acquiring European Portuguese (EP) as HL with children in the US acquiring Brazilian Portuguese (BP) as HL. The study shows a complete acquisition of morpho-syntactic and semantic competence regarding inflected infinitives only in heritage EP, while this level of competence was not reached by children acquiring heritage BP where the colloquial varieties lack inflected infinitives. The authors therefore introduce the term missing-input competence divergence for the case described. Putnam and Sánchez (2013:481) propose to distinguish input as mere raw linguistic data from intake defined as the operation in which the mind/brain participates while interpreting, extracting and storing the features which serve as the fundamental building blocks of grammar, i.e., the formal features as defined in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995). Their approach attempts to draw the spectrum of possibilities for bilinguals, in particular early sequential bilinguals, in terms of access to and activation of formal features, independently from the issues of quantity and quality of input (Putnam and Sánchez, 2013:485). Flores (in this issue) argues in favor of HL acquisition as a native acquisition process with innovative potential where the monolingual speakers show variation and some delay in lately acquired domains due to a reduced input situation. Regarding the input question more specifically, she expects that, if it is true that reduced access to formal registers of the target language is an important factor in HL acquisition, HS may show a weaker (or even absent) knowledge of linguistic structures occurring predominantly in standard registers; additionally, HS may show variation especially in the domains where monolinguals also display variation in their competence output. This prediction is tested by Rinke and Flores (2014, in Flores, in this issue) who investigate the linguistic competence of 18 adult Portuguese-German bilinguals in their HL, namely EP, and a monolingual control group (18 monolingual speakers of EP). Focusing on allomorphic clitic forms and the use of strong pronouns instead of a dative clitic, two main important results emerge: (1) EP native speakers (the reference being not clear here, but probably monolinguals) have a slight tendency to accept strong pronouns instead of the clitic form, while the average of rejection of the strong pronouns is much lower in HS. The authors explain this difference between monolinguals and HS as a consequence of their input situation, as HS mainly come into contact with oral forms of colloquial EP allowing for some variation in the use of strong dative pronouns. In summation, the authors view the lower performance of the HS not as the outcome of a ‘‘deficient’’ knowledge but as the result of a ‘‘different’’ and ‘‘innovative’’ grammar and they argue that the heritage grammar promotes linguistic changes which are inherent to the speech of monolingual speakers and which come into play in monolingual speakers if it comes to different dialects of one ‘‘standard’’ language. 2.3. Intra- vs. extra-linguistic features Both attrition effects and evidence for incomplete acquisition are shown to affect different language phenomena to a different degree, both in the literature and in the contributions to the present volume on various language combinations and age groups of bilingual individuals. The crucial question thus concerns the interaction of intra- and extra-linguistic features and within each group of features. In the following, we briefly present the interaction of intra- and extra-linguistic features from the contributions in this volume and relate them to important results in the literature on heritage language acquisition, trying to identify the most relevant feature interactions, starting with the comparison of different linguistic phenomena. Hager and Müller (in this issue) compare three types of parametrized phenomena and show that the individual language proficiency and language balance of the bilingual children investigated play a role only in language periphery phenomena, while those phenomena associable to so-called ‘‘core parameters’’ (e.g., word order) or ‘‘subcase parameters’’ (e.g., the null subject parameter, both terms from Uriagereka 2005) are acquired without effects. Importantly, monolingual children also show the same problems in the language periphery. The authors therefore argue that both

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monolingual and heritage (adult) speakers change the language in the periphery. Flores (in this issue) supports this view: The assumption often found in the literature that language dominance may affect heritage language acquisition is not borne out. More precisely, she assumed that, if it is true that transfer from the dominant language may prevent the full development of a particular structure in the heritage language, heritage speakers should show a protracted development of those properties which have competing structures in the dominant language, i.e., heritage bilinguals faced with more than one grammatical option in their HL may reveal a tendency to use a structure that also exists in their dominant grammar and to discard a structure existing only in their heritage language. This prediction has been tested in the study by Santos and Flores (2013; in Flores, in this issue) which compares the performance of 20 EP heritage children (mean age 9.8 years) and 20 EP monolingual children of similar age with regard to their knowledge of adverb placement and VP ellipsis, both depending on the same syntactic core property, namely verb movement, and VP ellipsis being acquired very early (i.e., a ‘‘core parameter’’ phenomenon, corresponding to Hager and Müller). The main finding in the results of the written elicited production task is that the heritage bilinguals do not show significant differences regarding their knowledge of redundancy resolution strategies (including VP ellipsis), the HL children producing VP ellipsis at the level of monolingual controls. This result contradicts the prediction that in case of competing structures (VP ellipsis vs. pseudostripping and argument drop), bilingual children would resort to structures in their dominant language overlooking structures only available in the minority language, in this case VP ellipsis. While these studies do not find evidence for bilingualism effects in terms of language (im)balance, the type of bilingualism (HL vs. L2 acquisition) does have an effect: Kaltsa et al. show that both age and bilingualism (type) do matter. They show that there is an age effect in pronominal resolution in the monolingual participants: The older participants display weaker preferences for both overt and null pronouns allowing subject and object antecedents in both experiments significantly more often than the younger participants. Furthermore, the authors investigated whether there is also an effect of bilingualism which they detect in two observations: bilingualism triggers differences only in pronominal resolution of overt pronouns, but surfaces as indeterminacy in the response time with both overt and null pronouns. The factor of age is possibly the most important, yet not the only factor (and often combined with other factors affecting a particular age group) in both sociolinguistic and HL acquisition works (here, see in particular Montrul, 2008). For instance, Livert and Otheguy (2010) focus on first generation speakers (newcomers) of American varieties of Spanish and show that those who arrived in New York between the ages of four and fourteen years showed a significantly higher rate of pronoun use than those who arrived as young adults or older. In their study, three extra-linguistic predictors are shown to be particularly relevant: age of arrival, exposure to New York and region of origin. Anstatt (2011) also mentions the age of arrival as the most important factor (which clusters with other circumstances in the life of young immigrants, in her study on Russian immigrants coming to Germany), identifying the 12th birthday as a turning point. Migration before this moment affects the L1 far more than afterwards. Further important, and possibly stabilizing, factors are education in the home and alphabetization, allowing access to the written L1 and cognitive support for the L1. With regard to second generation (i.e., heritage) children, Flores and Barbosa (2014) show in their study (oral elicitation task on clitic placement with 24 Portuguese children aged between seven and fifteen years, comparing heritage speakers monolingual children) that EP heritage children acquire the contexts of proclisis, although at a slower pace than monolinguals but in the same stages, including a phase of overgeneralization of enclisis. Older heritage speakers are shown to have a better knowledge of clitic placement patterns than younger ones, which confirms the assumption that the reduced input in HL acquisition settings may slow down the development. Another factor taken to be important in the literature is the generation, for instance in the work on heritage speakers on the use of overt subjects in the Spanish of Latin American immigrants and their descendants residing in New York by Otheguy et al. (2007, 2010). They show that the influence of the dominant language English on the minority language Spanish is not the only factor but rather accompanied by a mutual influence of contact with different Spanish varieties due to the contact within the Spanish speech community of New York. The authors identify important differences in the rates of overt subjects between mainland American Spanish varieties (e.g., Mexican) and Caribbean Spanish varieties (e.g., Cuban). Otheguy et al. (2010) observe clear changes in the second generation concerning the increased rates of occurrence of subject pronouns (investigated as the dependent variable) and the role played by the independent linguistic variables of grammatical person of the verb form, verb meaning, clause type and discourse and the extra-linguistic variables of generation (newcomers vs. residents) and region (Mainland vs. Caribbean). However, Nagy (in this issue) contradicts these findings. Her sociolinguistic study of heritage language variation and change is based on a variationist model, using null subjects and Voice Onset Time (VOT) as dependent variables and generation and heritage language as independent ones (to which particular linguistic factors for each grammatical domain are added, e.g., grammatical person for (null) subjects and following vowel for VOT) in a multivariate analysis. Summarizing her results, Nagy does not find strong support for English influence in later generations of speakers of different heritage languages (including the homeland variety, where available) and no correlations between linguistic performance and measures of reported language exposure, use or preference. Age also proves to be an advantage.

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2.4. Methodological issues The discussion presented so far points to several critical methodological issues; in the first place, we find the criticized use of monolingual control groups (see section 2.1). Most prominently, Pires (2011) demands to study HL grammars in their own right as new linguistic systems. Related to this point, we have to find ways how to deal with the variation also observed in monolinguals since linguistic variation and potential linguistic change does not arise solely through bilingualism (the latter is not the source but a good accelerator); there is also much variation among the monolingual speakers. Hager and Müller (in this issue) point to the similarities between monolingual and bilingual children in the domains studied. Nagy and Flores (in this issue) also discuss this point: Flores argues that the variation observed in monolingual groups becomes highlighted and larger in HL acquisition. Nagy adds the need to present both group and individual results in the studies in order to see the variation more clearly. In this sense, the integration of monolingual data could be very fruitful: it should serve to compare the degrees of variation in monolingual and bilingual groups but not to judge the ‘‘completeness’’ of a monolingual variety in bilingual individuals. The next big methodological complex concerns the methods of data collection: Much work in HL acquisition has been done on the basis of experimental data, but there are also studies based on conversational data. The present volume contains both types of studies which are, as in most cases, separated from each other: While Flores and Kaltsa et al. use experimental data, Hager and Müller study longitudinal child data (child conversation) and Nagy (in this issue) uses adult conversational data as base for multivariate analyses with mixed effects models in order to capture the in-group variation. She highlights the importance of the methodology applied to the data which may yield very different results in experimental vs. conversational data. Her proposal to apply both comparative variationist and experimental methodology on the same speakers and grammatical domains supports the argument by Benmamoun et al. (2013b). Unless this is done for various language combinations, the conclusions for (in)completeness of acquisition has to remain open according to Nagy. Possibly, the traditional way of collecting data, using, for instance, grammaticality judgment tests which may deliver findings being an artifact of these methodologies, should be abandoned in favor of the inclusion/combination with psycholinguistic methods which would help us to disentangle whether participants’ performance is a question of grammatical/representational deficits or changes or rather processing difficulties. Likewise, we need to assemble corpuses of input provided in the homes of HSs in order to analyze properly the quantity and quality of input and to compare it against comparable input data received in the homes of children and adults raised monolingually. Finally, both types of data have to be related by studying the same individuals as proposed by Nagy. Ideally, further research based on the proposed mix of methodologies mentioned above will be able to separate the role of the three factors that enter into the growth of language in the individual, also related to HL development, according to Chomsky (2005:6), namely genetic endowment, experience (leading to variation) and principles not specific to the faculty of language. 3. DOM in heritage Spanish: evidence for language change in progress In this section, we attempt to illustrate the role of the language combination, of different methodologies and involved intra- and extra-linguistic features in the domain of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Spanish, rather under-studied with regard to language acquisition, and interesting in particular for HL acquisition as a domain where English and German, the most studied majority languages in this volume, can be shown not to be a source of direct influence but display a change within the Spanish contact variety in progress. There are few studies on bilingual learners (see Rodriguez-Mondoñedo’s, 2008 work on monolingual Spanish children), among them one on early bilinguals, namely school-aged English-Spanish children with different degrees of language dominance by Guijarro-Fuentes and Marinis (2011), who tested the use of DOM by these children using an experiment and comparing them with monolingual peers. The authors show that the bilingual children are less accurate than monolingual children in the use of the preposition ‘a’, but show similar patterns of errors regardless of their degree of bilingualism. Their linguistic performance is not related to the measured external factors, but hinges rather on the proficiency degree in Spanish. With regard to second language acquisition (L2) of Spanish DOM, Guijarro-Fuentes (2011, 2012) ran two experiments with learners with L1 English. He showed that they learn the conditions on DOM in a piecemeal fashion. The only condition for which all learner groups prove robust knowledge was the animacy condition. Finally, and most importantly for the present paper, there is also some work on the acquisition of DOM in HL acquisition of Spanish in the USA. Montrul (2004) and her subsequent work investigates both subject and object expression in Spanish heritage speakers (of Mexican descent) in the USA, with some attention to DOM. Using a narrative with the two established groups of heritage speakers (intermediate and advanced HS) and the control group, there was a restricted set of verbs typically used, in all cases with animate subjects. The result of the analysis of the used verbs showed that omissions of the marker occurred with verbs allowing the omission (states and activities) and also with verbs not allowing the omission (achievements and accomplishments). A clear, semantically based, distribution for the omissions observed could not be found in the data. The study by Montrul and Bowles (2009) is entirely devoted to the use of DOM in Spanish speaking heritage speakers (speakers of Mexican descent only). They

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were confronted with several tests with the overall result of incomplete acquisition. The most important observation of the authors is that HS of all proficiency levels, including advanced speakers, omitted a-marking with animate and specific direct objects in production and judged sentences without a-marking as acceptable significantly more than the native speakers did. Summarizing these few available studies, which exclusively contain the language combination of English and Spanish in the bilingual individuals, all investigators report less accuracy with DOM in bilinguals. Two questions arise: (1) Is an interpretation of the acquisition of DOM in HS as incomplete really necessary? And (2) to what degree do monolinguals (in particular in their function as input givers) possibly vary in their use of DOM? In the following, we briefly present some new findings from English-Spanish and German-Spanish bilinguals, living as heritage speakers in Great Britain and Germany, respectively, which suggest language change rather than deficits in this complex domain which is characterized by the subtle interaction of two groups of properties (see further below for the relevant feature combinations for the requirement of DOM): (a) semantic and (discourse) pragmatic properties of the object, i.e., (relative) animacy, definiteness, specificity and topicality, and (b) lexical semantics of the verb, i.e., lexical aspect (telicity, affectedness) and selectional restrictions with regard to the position of the object. Since English lacks overt case-marking and German has a totally different, morpho-syntactic case-marking system (based on uninterpretable features, see Schmitz, 2015b for details), cross-linguistic influence cannot account for the variation observed in HS Spanish of both groups. We therefore argue for changes in the systems of the HS under investigation. In a current research project, framed within the different generative acquisition hypotheses (i.e., Interpretability Hypothesis, Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, Full Access/Full Transfer and Interface Vulnerability Hypothesis) in order to account for the production and judgment data elicited, Guijarro-Fuentes et al. (accepted for publication) investigate the acquisition of the different semantic conditions related to Differential Object Marking (DOM) (see examples (1)--(4)) (cf. Guijarro-Fuentes, 2012 for a full review of the semantic properties of the object, the verb, and the subject as possible triggers or blockers of DOM) comparing two groups of adolescents matched for age: i.e., a group of English-Spanish heritage adolescents and a Spanish monolingual adolescent group. [1] [-/+animate, +specific object] Busco una casa que tenga tres pisos vs. Busco a una vendedora que vende las frutas. ‘I am looking for a house with three floors’ vs. ‘I seek a saleswoman who sells fruit.’ [2] [+affected, +animate, -specific object] El accidente hirio´ (a) dos pasajeros ‘The accident injured two passengers’ [3] [+telic verb], [+animate, -specific object] Juan hallo´ (a) una niña en una canasta en su porche ‘Juan found a baby in a basket on his porch’ [4] [+agent subject], [+animate, -specific object] La enferma está llamando a una enfermera ‘The sick woman is calling for a nurse’ The authors’ findings (see Table 1) point in different directions which have direct implications for heritage language acquisition research and beyond. With regard to so-called incompleteness, test results point to a different direction, i.e., heritage bilingual Spanish is similar to L1 monolingual Spanish. More importantly, based on the results obtained, the authors argue that heritage grammars are L1 grammars depending on the grammatical issue at stake (some grammatical aspects can be seen as more advanced in their

Table 1 Mean, standard deviation, and range of overall accuracy -- acceptability judgment task.

Monolingual Subjects [N = 10] Bilingual Subjects [N = 44]

Mean SD Range Mean SD Range

C1

C2

C3

C4

C5

C6

65.0 20.0 33--100 57.7 19.8 17--100

68.3 22.9 33--100 57.5 26.2 17--100

47.7 11.3 33--67 48.3 19.7 0--83

68.3 20.0 50--100 52.3 23.6 0--100

42.7 12.9 17--60 46.3 20.6 0--100

53.7 13.4 42--83 57.9 15.7 27--92

Note: C1 = [+animate, +specific]; C2 = [-animate, +/-specific]; C3 = [+animate, -specific]; C4 = stative/activity verb, [+human] subject; C5 = stative/activity verb, [-human] subject; C6 = accomplishment/achievement verb, [+/-human] subject.

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change in progress than others). In this respect, the certain degree of instability in some specific semantic conditions and that monolingual speakers’ (adults vs. adolescents) intuitions and perceptions may not go hand in hand with how the linguistic theory’s depict native competence grammar in relation to DOM (and for that matter, for other linguistic phenomena). Comparing the results from the current project with previous research (i.e., Guijarro-Fuentes, 2012), it is clear that native monolingual adolescents and native monolingual adults differ significantly, in which case we cannot say there is incomplete acquisition; on the contrary, it is delay and/or change in progress: the new generations of monolingual speakers do not seem to be using, or have the same, intuitions as the older monolingual generations about DOM. The same could be applied to any other research on heritage bilingual speakers when the divergent patters indeed show delay or language change in progress. Put differently, any signs of incomplete learning do not need to be ‘‘a bad thing’’: plausibly, this is the sort of variation introduced that can indeed trigger intrinsic language change. Let us now turn to the results from the German-Spanish bilinguals with regard to DOM. In a first attempt, Schmitz ( 2015b) compared Spanish heritage speakers (n = 8) with both a group of late bilinguals (first generation migrants, ‘‘L1 (Spanish)/L2 (German)’’, n = 8) and a group of monolingual Spanish speakers (‘‘control group’’, n = 7), based on spontaneous speech data (semi-structured interviews). In order to control for varieties, only speakers from Spain were included (see Tippets, 2011 for variation of DOM across Spanish dialects). Schmitz (2015b) shows that the HS do not exhibit evidence for incomplete acquisition which would yield the absence of DOM but a higher degree of variation and inaccuracy in the mastery of DOM than the other two groups. The most surprising result is the absolute avoidance of DOM with animate objects of the atelic and very frequently used verb tener ‘to have’. None of the results can be explained by cross-linguistic influence from the German case-marking system which would yield a general lack of DOM, whereas they may be the outcome of a linguistic change in the system of these bilingual speakers which favors the extension of the variation already existing in the system of the speakers who acquired Spanish as the only first language. In order to control for age effects and to get more data in ongoing work, Schmitz (2015a) has added further, mainly younger, HS (n = 13) and divided the HS into two groups: a younger HS1 group (children and teens, 9--14 years, n = 6) and an older HS2 group (young adults, 15--35 years, n = 7). All participants in the two groups frequented the remedial tutorials for heritage language speakers offered in Germany. The other two groups of comparison remained unchanged. The following Table 2 shows the overall results of all participants, i.e., both group and individual results, and illustrates the high amount of variation within all groups. Statistical (only non-parametrical) analyses showed no difference between the two HS groups and slight differences between the younger HS and the L1/L2 as well as the monolingual speakers with regard to inanimate objects (not requiring DOM). Most importantly, however, the aforementioned surprising result was maintained: none of the HS did realize any DOM with the verb tener, while there was variation with other verbs (see Fig. 1 below where both HS groups are taken together due to their similarity and where conocer2 is the atelic reading ‘to know’ of the polysemous verb conocer; to meet (for the first time), ‘to know’) and perfect mastery of DOM with the indefinite and unspecific pronouns nadie/alguien which, being important exceptions from the rule, require DOM. Summarizing this sketch of relevant results, the HS reflect the variation in the monolingual control group (and use even more DOM). Their use of DOM in obligatory contexts is native-like. The main difference concerns the systematic avoidance of ‘‘tener + a + object’’ which should be interpreted as evidence for a linguistic change which may be caused by

DOM with animate objects by verb type (abs.) 70 60 50 40

CG

30

L1/L2

20

HS1+2

10 0

tener DO+anim

tener aDO+anim

ver DO+anim

ver aDO+anim

conocer2 DO+anim

conocer2 aDO+anim

Fig. 1. Use of DOM by Spanish HS in Germany depending on the verb type.

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247

Table 2 Use of DOM with animate and inanimate objects. Speaker

DO+anim abs. (%)

DO-anim abs. (%)

a DO+anim. abs. (%)

a DO-anim. abs. (%)

Total enun. (100%)

Control group (CG) AIHF0111 4 (6.7) LIF1211 7 (5.4) NBF0711 4 (2.8) NVF0111 2 (2.8) PCM0111 2 (2.6) MLF0112 10 (6.9) PSF0111 0 (0) Total GC 29 (4.1) Mean GC 4.1 (3.9) S.D. GC 3.4 (2.5)

55 (91.7) 118 (90.8) 122 (86.5) 62 (87.3) 70 (94.6) 127 (87.6) 92 (100) 646 (90.6) 92.3 (91.2) 30.4 (4.8)

1 (1.7) 5 (3.8) 15 (10.6) 7 (9.9) 1 (1.4) 8 (5.5) 0 (0) 37 (5.2) 5.3 (4.7) 5.3 (4.2)

0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 1 (1.4) 0 (0) 0 (0) 1 (0.1) 0.1 (0.2) 0.4 (0.5)

60 130 141 71 74 145 92 713

L1/L2 Group (L1/L2) ACM0411 9 (5.4) DAM0610 0 (0) MCF0411 3 (2.3) EOCF1111 2 (1.3) EMF0112 6 (6.9) IGF0611 9 (8.7) LMM0611 6 (8.6) MDPF0311 11 (6.1) Total L1/L2 46 (4.9) Mean L1/L2 5.8 (4.9) S.D. L1/L2 3.9 (3.3)

150 (90.4) 56 (96.6) 121 (93.8) 143 (95.4) 76 (88.4) 88 (85.4) 62 (88.6) 161 (89.4) 857 (91) 107.1 (91) 41.8 (3.9)

7 (4.2) 2 (3.4) 5 (3.9) 5 (3.3) 4 (4.7) 6 (5.8) 2 (2.8) 7 (3.9) 38 (4) 4.8 (4) 1.9 (0.9)

0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 1 (0.6) 1 (0.1) 0.1 (0.1) 0.4 (0.2)

166 58 129 150 86 103 70 180 942

Younger HS group (HS 1) SNF0612 7 (12.5) LMM0312 5 (10.9) LCF0312 7 (10.6) MRM0312 7 (16.7) JHM0312 0 (0) TNM0312 5 (10.2) Total HS 1 31 (11) Mean HS 1 5.2 (10.2) S.D. HS 1 2.7 (5.5)

49 (87.5) 40 (87) 53 (80.3) 34 (80.9) 22 (95.7) 42 (85.7) 240 (85.1) 40 (86.2) 11.1 (5.6)

0 (0) 1 (2.1) 6 (9.1) 1 (2.4) 1 (4.3) 2 (4.1) 11 (3.9) 1.8 (3.7) 2.1 (3.1)

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

56 46 66 42 23 49 282

Older HS group VMF0312 LNF0312 JPM0312 MLJF0511 MMF0312 MLF0412 MGGM0210 Total HS 2 Mean HS 2 S.D. HS 2

32 (86.5) 37 (77.1) 87 (95.6) 98 (86) 73 (91.3) 101 (80.8) 62 (96.9) 490 (87.7) 70 (87.7) 27.1 (7.4)

1 (2.7) 6 (12.5) 0 (0) 3 (2.6) 2 (2.5) 3 (2.4) 1 (1.6) 16 (2.7) 2.3 (3.5) 1.9 (4.1)

0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 0 (0) 2 (1.6) 0 (0) 0 (0.4) 0.3 (0.2) 0.8 (0.6)

(HS 2) 4 (10.8) 5 (10.4) 4 (4.4) 13 (11.4) 5 (6.2) 19 (15.2) 1 (1.6) 51 (9.1) 7.3 (8.6) 6.3 (4.7)

(0) (0) (0) (0) (0) (0) (0) (0) (0)

37 48 91 114 80 125 64 559

contact with other Spanish varieties with a slightly different DOM system but not by influence from German. Both observations from situations of Spanish as a minority language illustrate an interesting outcome of the language contact situation without direct influence from the majority languages which deserve further research. 4. Final remarks Concluding our introduction, we would like to emphasize that the intention of the papers included in this Special issue is an attempt to tackle the so-called ‘‘incomplete acquisition’’ from the point of view of speakers of multiple grammars within a single grammar (Roeper, 1999). There is no doubt that heritage speakers may set parameters very early on, perhaps before the onset of language production, thus may have access to them in later life. This would mean

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that children who hear one language from immigrants until they start speaking, and then another from parents who want their children to speak the language of the country of residence, may have set these parameters in a ‘‘silent’’ manner, possibly very early (before starting to speak), which can be measured in language comprehension. The findings reported so far point to the evidence of the presence of multiple grammars, not a failure/incompleteness to grasp part of one grammar. The data reported herein correspond to grammatical structures of heritage languages as proper language systems that can be studied and the socio-political consequences of such findings (if they happen to be correct) can have a large impact beyond linguistic theory and what most of us do as linguists. We may all be right or (most of the time, most of us) wrong, and nothing much happens either way; but getting this right (and for that matter, getting rid of ‘‘incomplete learning’’) for learners of heritage languages, especially in today’s globalized world, is clearly a very important topic and a far reaching twist. Related to that, we need to stress that most of the languages analyzed are considered nonprestigious/minority, which is also true for most of the heritage languages acquired in a migration setting. Thus it is important to emphasize that heritage speakers are bilinguals who may grow up in a mono-/bicultural home where one of the languages may or may not dominate, where the language of the environment may or may not be spoken by at least one parent, and very importantly, depending on the heritage language in question, the minority language they speak may or may not be well accepted in the community and may possibly not be a school subject. Finally, we would like to stress how important it is to work with both qualitative and quantitative data combining cross-sectional and single longitudinal studies in order to increase our understanding of heritage language acquisition and the involved systems as languages in their own right. Acknowledgments Last, but not least, we would like to acknowledge the time that the external reviewers took in order to read and provide comments on all papers. These contributions were invaluable. In alphabetical order, we would like to thank: José Camacho (Rutgers University, USA), Katja Francesca Cantone-Altintaş (Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany), Ana Maria Carvalho (University of Arizona, USA), Joao Costa (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal), Laurent Dekydtspotter (University of Indiana, USA), Laura Domínguez (University of Southampton, UK), Manuel J. Gutiérrez (University of Houston, USA), Tania Ionin (University of Illinois, USA), Gregory D. Keating (San Diego State, USA), Tom Roeper (University of Massachusetts, USA), Miguel Simonet (University of Arizona, USA) and Juan Uriagereka (University of Maryland, USA). We greatly appreciate their professionalism and their commitment to ensuring the high degree of quality reflected in this edited volume. Furthermore, we would like to thank Johan Rooryck and Aniko´ Lipták (both Leiden University, The Netherlands) for helping us out with all the problems which occurred during the publication process. Again, a big thank you to you all!

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Pedro Guijarro-Fuentesa,b University of Balearic Islands, Majorca, Spain b Greenwich University, UK

a

Katrin Schmitz* University of Wuppertal, Germany *Corresponding author E-mail address: [email protected] (K. Schmitz). 13 May 2015 Available online 19 June 2015